The original, 21-page short story version of

"Premature Nova"

The original draft was written on a mechanical typewriter, with no right
margin until the middle of the 14th page. It was based on a dream I had, which
explains some of the weirdness, but not all of it. All spellings,
punctuation, capitalizations, science errors, etc. are as in the
original.

You have been warned.

NUMBER FIVE IN THE DREAM SERIES!

I had always admired our sun. It was what had originally brought life to our
planet some billion years ago by supplying the heat that kept us from freezing.
With its help, we were able to become a rich and prosperous planet whose only
worry was self-destruction. The death of the sun wasn't due for over six
billion years.

It was a beautiful weekend. There were numerous white clouds daintily whisping
to and fro in the sky, none of them daring to intercept the yellow-white
morning star. But something else did.

As I was laying face up on the grass of a nearby park, I saw a layer of black
completely cover the sun, leaving it only emitting scintillating rainbow bands
surrounding the black disk, which seemed oddly glossed. That was strange,
indeed, for the next total eclipse in the United States wasn't due 'till well
into the twenty-first century. In addition, a total eclipse takes a full seven
hours to reach totality; this thing, whatever it was, became black almost
instantly. Finally, why was this thing lighting up the Earth as brightly as the
sun would've normally?

As I was pondering over these weirdnesses, it suddenly became clear that this
phenomenon was definitely not an eclipse when the area of blackness
changed its appearence. It had doubled its size.

I quickly stood up, aware of a feeling of danger and fear fleeting through my
body. What could possibly cause a pseudo-eclipse to double in size, and still
leave an equal amount of luminous fringe around the edges? The only thing that
could keep supplying this much light through this kind of obstruction was: a
larger sun.

A larger sun! No, it couldn't be! It was simply impossible! It wasn't supposed
to do this for ... for ...

Well, no matter how impossible it was, it had happened. As the black disc
dissipated, the sky was filled with a paler, more yellowish light. As I glanced
back up at the sky, the sun could be easily seen spinning its 25-day rotation
in a matter of seconds per revolution. The sunspots on its photosphere were
easily visible due to its doubled size, and it was a pale yellow, fading on
into orange. Yes, the inevitable had happened; our sun was becoming a
nova.

No. I simply couldn't accept the fact that our home planet would soon be a pile
of ashes inside a red giant star, being slowly sucked into its central inferno
by its constant gravity. I didn't want to have just a week to live, I wanted to
live my life out to its full extent. I had to escape the nova's fury, and the
only way to do this was to get off the planet.

I had recently read about the imminent launching of the space shuttle Columbia
II, designed for interplanetary travel. A journey out as far as Mars' orbit
would surely bring me out of nova range. The asteroid belt would be a perfect
home, in fact, for the ten thousand years of the nova's life. At that distance,
the temperature would be about 215 degrees farenheit (102 celsius) in a vacuum,
or maybe as much as 61 farenheit in one atmosphere pressure. In fact, the
Asteroid Belt was so loaded with rare (and common) elements that it had about
triple the resource supply of earth, with the notable exception of fossil fuel.

The launching was to take place in San Diego. Even though I was in Santa Monica
at the time, I felt an extreme urgency to get there as quickly as possible,
along with a feeling of incredible distance, as of that from death to life,
stretched across that score of miles. I had to take a Greyhound bus there
immediately.

It was a shameful pity that only about three percent of the population of this
country knew precisely what a nova was. The other ninety-seven percent probably
thought it was some kind of car. Nevertheless, the people at Cape San Diego
obviously had to know what the sun's odd shape ment. My bus was
arriving.

Money was no object for this trip, since my life (not to mention the whole
worlds') was on the line from that nova. The trip cost some hole money, but a
trip to safety is worth any price, almost.

When I arrived, I was well ahead of the launch. I had not looket at the growing
nova for over an hour, so I dared a glance into the heavens above. Now
that was odd ... the nova seemed to be precisely the same size as it was
when the nova stage began! Well, maybe a nova starts in very quickly, then
slows down tremendously, taking about a week to expand to full size. No one had
actually timed a nova before, so that may actually be a very accurate
description. The world would find out soon enough.

The Greyhound stop was only about a five-minute walk away from the Cape
entrance. I had expected to see a tremendous mob of that 3% of the world trying
to force their way into the complex just to get aboard the departing shuttle.
What I was, however, was a single guard making his everyday rounds by the front
door. Could the public have been that uninformed?

The guard appeared a little groggy from patrolling; evidently it was nearing
the end of his shift. In a moment of panickyness such as this, your eyes become
very alert to anything unusual, although your brain may hastily jump to the
wrong conclusion. From the slight crack in the otherwise closed doorway, I
deduced that I wasn't the first attempting to get aboard this shuttle. Someone
else knew of the nova.

I approached the guard rather quickly. When I reached him, I raised my arm to
the height of my shoulders, pointed an arbitrary direction away from the
building, and shouted, "Hey! Look, over there!"

The guard immediately redirected his gaze in the direction of my arm, and kept
it there for a good number of seconds. Within that time, I was easily able to
dash through the door, and allow it to close silently behind me. By the time
the guard figured out what was happening, I was down the corridor, around a
corner, well out of sight of the guard, who was then peering through the glass
door.

As I was in transit to the heart of the complex, wherever that was, I
encountered a few janitors, whose suspicions were obviously aroused because A)
they had been working there for several years, and had not seen me here before,
and B) I was running down hallways as though my life depended on it, which it
probably did.

"Hay! Hay, where you goin'?!", the older of the two asked me.

I hadn't time to answer, and besides, answering would inhibit my passage even
more than not doing so. I increase my determination in running, and in doing so
multiplied my speed at no additional strain to my body. The janitors had to go
back on duty, anyway.

After about a minute of following endless corridors in what I had assumed was
the right direction, I finally arrived at a large red door marked "Launch
elevator — autorized personnel only". I knew this had to be what I was
searching for. I turned the knob and made the door fly open, expecting to see
a large crowd trying to force its way into the cargo chamber.

What I saw, however, was three technicians, two japanese astronauts in space
suits, and an eighth-grade oriental child prodegy named Alex Wei. Although the
technicians didn't seem excited over my barging in, they weren't completely
horrified, either.

"Who are you?" one of them asked.

"That's not important. What is important is that the sun is becoming a
nova, and I need transportation off this Earth pronto."

"The sun? A car?!"

"No, no! A nova's — well, come to the window and see for yourself!"

Two of the technicians, and both astronauts, came to a nearby window and peered
up at the sun. Yes, it was deep yellow and double sized, but the technicians
still had no idea of what it meant. Evidently, Alex had tried the same
maneuver, and obtained the same results.

"Uh, how many people is there room for in that space shuttle up there?" I was
making a reference to the cabin an elevator shaft's length above us. We were at
the shuttles soon-to-be-vacant base.

"About seven," declared one of the technicians.

"And how many people are going on it?"

"Three; these two astronauts, and this short Albert Einstein."

"I was ... wondering if you'd ... have enough room for four."

"Say what?!"

"I want to go on this shuttle, too."

"Hmmm ... well, okay. But you'll need a space suit ... just in case."

He quickly led me to a small closet labeled "Space suits". Digging into the
racks, he pulled out and presented me with a loose lump of space suit sections,
which looked like big, semicircular slices of Spam.

"Hey, what am I supposed to do with these?"

"Just lay them all over your body and they'll all come into place."

That was indeed what they did. I began with my legs and built up to my neck,
covering my head with a large helmet. After about thirty seconds of standing
inert, the glue (or whatever it was) between the spam slices had become an
airtight bond completely protecting me from the elements. In addition, this
suit refined the air I used just as a plant would so that my air supply would
never run out!

I quickly removed the suit; it wouldn't be necessary until deep sace near the
asteroid belt. If we were going to the asteroid belt!

"Hey, where's this shuttle going?" I asked.

"The asteroid belt."

Well, that cleared up that problem. Now the next problem:

"When's this thing gonna launch?"

"In about, oh, five minutes."

Hmmm ... I'd never seen such a casual and quick launch before. I guess space
travel was becoming more of an everyday thing than I'd expected. Nevertheless,
I had to get into the cabin, and very quickly.

The elevator edged up from the ground pad, carrying me, Alex, and the two
fully-suited astronauts. The airtight doorway was completely open, evidently
for quick entry, but more than likely because they just casually left it that
way.

As soon as the elevator reached the top, I stepped through the door and began
examining the instrumentation. It didn't seem quite as complex as jet
instrumentation, yet it was definitely moreso than that of an IBM
microcomputer. The one item that caught my eye was a plain, black joystick,
obviously used for maneuvering the craft in and out of the atmosphere. Space
ships were getting casual.

"Everybody in their seats; launch in two minutes!" said one of the technicians
far below us through a megaphone.

A bright red sign marked "No Smoking — Fasten Safety Belts" flashed up
near the instrument panel. I wasn't worried about the smoking part, although I
did securely pull a big black strap around my waist, along with a second going
around my right shoulder that was obviously bonded to the waist belt;
afterwhich, I buckled the whole two-strap assembly. I was completely ready for
the launch.

Immediately, one of the astronauts reached above his head, and flipped a small
white switch marked with a lower-case "i". The engines roared, and the whole
kit and kaboodle began to lift from the launch pad. Within a few seconds, we
were airborne.

The newly designed shuttle had no disposable rocket fuel tanks or side rockets
as did the Enterprise and the Columbia, yet this launch would use only about
twenty percent of its rocket fuel. Furthermore, rocket power was not its
primary source of propulsion — this occupation was held by the gigantic
ion engines, now held safely inside the hull of the shuttle. And even that was
suppressed by the big solar sail, which, of course, could only be used when in
close orbit of the sun.

Because of this, I was deeply afraid that sometime during our solar orbit, the
sun would break out in a full-scale nova, and swallow this ship like nothing.
Why hadn't the crew taken this into consideration? Did they just want to take a
lot of chances?

We were soon out of Earth's atmosphere, and began orbiting to reach escape
velocity (seven miles per second). The great ion engine was already coming
slowly out of the hull, going both out from the body and back from its center.
While it was inside the hull, it consumed about three fourths of all the
available space; for the other quarter was necessary for the mylar-thin solar
sail, which would be in use within two hours.

I turned my glance toward the close dying star. Now, I knew something
was fishy; the sun was completely normal! But ... but ... ?!??

Our orbit began to swing from the Earth, out toward the apparently normal sun.
Suddenly, as if being released from the grip of a giant, our orbit of Earth
became an orbit of the sun, coming on with a large jolt. Now that we were
nearing our star, I needed to don my space suit to reserve cabin oxygen.

I removed my seat strap, rose to my feet in the artificial gravity, and began
contemplating on where I put my space suit when we got on. Hmmm ... let's see
... nope, it wasn't in the closet. Not in the storage chest, either. Aha! Now
I remembered: it was on the ... the launching pad back on Earth!

Yes, I had forgetten my space suit. Dammit, I forget everything
nowadays! I had to make some simple mnemonic devices so I wouldn't forget as
much. But that was of little concern to me at the time; the astronauts were
going to drop the cabin pressure to zero very soon.

'Well, maybe the sun wasn't normal — maybe it just looked that
way', I thought to myself, quickly changing the subject at hand. I quickly took
a small metric ruler from a large odds-and-ends compartment at the front of the
shuttle and, holding it at arm's length, measured the diameter of the Earth.
It was about five millimetres.

Reaching into a larger compartment, I produced a large metrestick, and holding
this at the same angle I did the ruler, measured the distance from Earth to
sun. It was much too large a distance to measure, but seemed about sixty metres
long.

I did a quick series of mental calculations, and arrived at an approximation:
96 million miles. Almost exactly normal distance! The sun had not changed in
size, since it had not changed its distance from the Earth. No nova was
present.

Now, not only were my eyes filled with anger, but my mind was darting in nearly
all directions. Just what could've happened to that double sized yellow-orange
light certer? Had it already gone back to its original form? Could the nova
have just been one of those instances where the sun "breathes"? And, even
worse, what's gonna happen to me when the pressure is dropped to zero?

The astronauts and Alex weren't about to keep this thing sealed up just because
one dummy forgot his space suit. After about an hour of extremely fast flight
(the fastest ever achieved by a man-made vehicle), we were in close orbit
around the sun. Not only was I afraid of the vacuum, but I wasn't too thrilled
about the extreme temperature, either. I was guessing it'd be around 300
degrees Celsius.

I looked around the spac e ship thoroughly, then out the window at the sun, for
I was almost certain it was going to be my last look. As I was scanning the
area once more, I noticed one of the astronauts poised over a large red handle
marked "airlock".

'Why are they doing this to me', I thought. 'I've forgotten my space suit. Yet
they continue as if I meant nothing! Well, I am a passenger, but I don't see
why I shouldn't be as important as ... Great Nova! What am I thinking?!
Nobody is important! IT's always been that way, and it always will. Oh,
no ... there goes the handle!'

The astronaut at the airlock door had turned the red handle, sounding with a
low, thuddish "clank". I could begin to hear the air just barely seeping out of
the newly made crack, and then ... whump! The door was flung wide open.

I braced myself to a seat in the middle of the cabin, prepared to be sucked out
the door and into the raging inferno. To my great surprise, I felt no pressure
change at all! The solar winds were that dense! And what's more, it couldn't
have been more than thirty degrees Celsius!

Now, only one problem remained: the composition of the gas. All stars are big
glowing balls of hydrogen and helium, which everyone knows are unbreatheable.
Even if the air out there had a little oxygen in it, I still wouldn't
be able to survive, since it was only at about one-half atmosphere pressure, or
around eight psi.

I had been holding my breath out ever since the red handle was turned. It had
to be then ... or never. I sniffed in a minute trace of the air. It smelled all
right, and seemed to agree with my lungs. Immediately, I sucked in a full
breath. It was breatheable enough for me.

I quickly exhaled the good air in a long sigh of relief. It was breatheable! I
was so excited that I shouted it out: "It's breatheable!"

The two astronauts turned to each other, and began inquiring themselves in
Japanese. I was so overexcited at the idea of still being alive after a lethal
experience that I had completely neglected to ponder on the obvious problem:
what brought all those conditions into the surrounding space? Certainly, I
could believe the half-atmosphere pressure, and I could nearly believe the
thirty-degree temperature (since we were at a near-perfect distance from the
sun), but an oxygen solar wind? There was no way that wind could come
from the sun; it had to be from some outside terran source. Or was it
from Earth?

Alex evidently still couldn't believe that I was breathing normally, for his
space suit was still fully in place. Nevertheless, since the air seemed
harmless to me, he'd gone over to a viewport and opened it just as he would a
house window of two frames. He was leaning out the space between the panes,
looking on to the distant photospheric inferno that was what you'd call below
us if it weren't for the zero gravity of the surrounding and total space.

I pushed off from the ground, launching my body in the direction of the open
window. Once I came within arms reach of the transparent-plated portal, I
extended my right hand, clamped it about the frame, and pulled my head through
the eight-inch slot, facing the sun. Now, it appeared even more normal than I
had expected it to be. A perfect, breathing sphere of hot, yellow-glowing
hydrogen and helium, laying far below us, and approaching us slowly under our
orbit.

Ah, now the temperature was beginning to rise. I sense it subtly at
first, but then growing with intensity. I was certain the temperature had risen
by at least five degrees Celsius since the airlock was first opened. Following
my instincts, I pulled my head back inside, feeling the heat diminish as I did
so. Yet even then the temperature continued rising.

One of the astronauts had pulled his way over to the instrument panel at the
front of the shuttle, and began turning a few dials, all red-colored (every
control was red-colored; evidently each control was "important", according to
the designers of the shuttle). Through the thin air of the solar wind, I heard
the hum of motors and hydraulic lifts coming from a good distance toward the
shuttle's rear. As the hydraulic sound grew louder and in greater supply, I
felt a distinct rocking, followed by an unexpected but powerful jolt. At the
same instante, I felt a medium-weak breeze of solar wind come through both the
open door and the open window. The solar sail was out.

Suddenly, I felt a deep chill come down my back. No, not a chill of emotion,
but a chill of temperature. Evidently, the sail was already in its place,
blocking the shine of the sun as well as riding on its solar wind. Now, I was
safe from the heat that may soon have took my life.

Within half-an-hour-and-a-quarter, we had reached perihelion, and were in a
very tight orbit, only a few million miles from the corona. Through a binocular
periscope stretching downward beneath the mylar sail, I was able to seee the
scintillating pyrotechnics of the solar corona. It was beautiful! It was like
the Aurora Borealis to the twelfth power, but yellow in color, and never
diminishing. Continual streaks of charged neutrons, hydrogen, and helium atoms
flew out from the photosphere, constantly replenishing the corona.

I withdrew my gaze from the periscope, and looked out on the shielded light
coming through the solar sail. The mylar had an unusual, glasslike chemical
construction, so that no ultra-violet would be able to pass through it. Thus,
it was safe to take a gander at the sun.

The mylar shielding had given it a purplish tint, and yet the corona was still
barely visible. We were evidently about half 'way done with our first orbit;
about one more and we'd fling off with our new speed toward the 'belt. And
that would only be a few minutes.

And after those few minutes had passed, what of the solar wind that had
supported my life? An obvious solution was to trap some of that solar wind, and
save it for later use. And what better place to store it than in the hull?

I pulled myself over to the control console in the barely detectable artificial
gravity of our orbital acceleration. The instrumentation was clearly marked
— two big red knobs labeled "Left hull door" and "right hull door"
respectively. I tested each for which way it had been turned, turned each the
opposite direction until they would go no further.

At first, all I could hear was the hum of hydraulic motors slowly forcing the
hull doors closed. Then "clank!", followed by "creeeeeeek!" and finally the
loud "snap!" of metal fatigue. The hull doors had completely snapped of the
gigantic ion engine. Oh well, we weren't going to use that again, anyway.

The two astronauts immediately rushed over to me, one pulling me away from the
console, the other staring at the controls. It was too late to do anything now;
the doors were almost completely closed.

Then, another "creeeeeeek!" sound, only this one sounded ... different. The
hull doors were giving in around the girders of the solar sail! As the doors
closed completely, I knew there was no sense in reopening them; and,
furthermore, we still had our primary means of propulsion.

Meanwhile, Alex was just being a simple spectator, posing questions of me and
the astronauts which, through the helmet and thin atmosphere, I could neither
hear nor understand.

Now, stored within the hull, I had enough oxygen to last me for at least two
Earth "days". And since our orbit was widening rapidly, I had to get myself in
there as soon as possible.

I pushed myself out the door that was in the shadow of the sail. I had to
remain in the shadows, or else the ultraviolet solar rays would give me
"instant skin cancer." I pulled myself along makeshift handles on the shuttle's
skin, quickly working my way over to the hull. Already I could feel the
thinning air begin to prey on my lungs, as my breathing intensity steadily
increased. I had to work fast.

But just as the thin air was a burden to my lungs, it was a blessing to my
range of movement. As the air diminished with agonizing slowness, so my speed
became steadily greater (or was that from natural adrenalin that sets in during
panic?).

Pull after pull wizzed by; makeshift rung after makeshift rung. Inside of two
minutes, I was upon the hull doors where they enclosed around the girders of
the solar sail. Now, the toughest part of surviving came into play: I had to
open the hull doors unaided, and with my bare hands; and with the air still
thinning.

I felt around the steel bent out of shape surrounding the girders, found it
completely sealed them off with no gaps. Air tight. This was going to be more
difficult than I had expected. I inched my now tight fingers about a large
steel flap, attempting to get as much leverage as possible in the swiftly
dwindling external air supply. I grasped the same flap with my other hand, now
using the old technique of complete relaxation before doing a strenuous task.
But I had to work quickly; the air was almost completely gone.

I yanked at the flap at first, then changed this to a continuous pull. No give.
"C'mon, you have to work!", I yelled to no one in particular. Suddenly,
I thought I felt an ever so slight bending, followed by a microscopic trickle
of air escaping from inside. Ah, my own feeble strength could never pry open
the doors alone, but now I was aided by eight poinds per square inch of
pressure from inside, since the air around me was no more. With a quick jerk, I
pulled the door open by about a foot, allowing me ample room to force myself
down through the whooshing air.

Once I was inside, I laxated my grip on the door, which quickly snapped shut
due to the hydraulics behind the hull's construction. I was in pitch darkness,
unable to see except with my ears and hands. I outstretched the latter, found
the main sail girder, which I quickly began pulling myself down (I couldn't
tell whether it was down or sideways; but at least it led somewhere).

As I was going the girder's length, my right hand came across something that
fillibrated it badly. I jerked it away quickly. WHat I had felt was a high
voltage electrical cable. Another second of exposure and my hand would have
fried. I couldn't risk using the girder to guide me any longer.

I pushed myself from the girder in the direction it was going, yet out a few
feet, or a couple of meters if you're talking European. I had given myself a
hard push, for if I failed to reach a solid surface I'd probably be floating
around endlessly in midair until artificial or natural gravity was created.

Fortunately, my feet found the floor and settled onto it easily. I pulled my
body downward and clung to the smooth steel ground; if I ever left it.... It
wasn't a very nice thought.

I felt around before me, discovered what seemed to be a crumpled piece of
paper. Strange ... a crumpled piece of trash where sanitariness should prevail
... ?

I crawled about in the general direction of forward. Movement in a place like
this was infinitely more dangerous than in a darkened cave. First of all, you
don't have that nice little gravity to tell you what way you're going, nor to
keep you on the ground, for that matter. Secondly, if this had been a
zero-gravity cave, there would've been nice little natural stalagmites to cling
to. Survival in a place like a darkened zero-G hull was nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, I continued onward.

After about three minutes (I'd estimated I'd covered some half-metre of
ground), I came upon an oddly shaped and sluggish box. From the inertia it
posessed, I'd estimate it weighed some twenty-five pounds back on Earth. As I
was fumbling with its every protrusion, I came across what was evidently a
switch. I flipped it.

A shaft of bright, yellow-white light sprang from the top of the device,
reaching to the ceiling above me. I shielded my eyes from the intense glare
that I was so unadapted to after ten minutes of total darkness. After a few
seconds, I dared a squint.

There wasn't much to see on the ceiling, except the gap between the doors. I
grasped the floodlamp, and tilted it so that its beam shone on the ground
before me.

The place was littered all over with sundry types of trash; from empty bags of
chips to cigarette butts. I had no idea the launch was this casual! Even
the maintainence crew left their unwanted trash just lying
around, littering the floor. So massive was the
trash that it hadn't even floated off the ground.

Well, no matter how cheap the place looked, it was going to be my home for a
while. I scanned the area, noticed a wad of dark blue paper off to my left. I
outstretched my arm to reach it, suddenly aware of how hungry I was after not
eating for at least ten hours. I unfolded the paper, and read with growing
excitement. Laid out on a single blue print was the entire flight plan of the
shuttle, times and all!

According to the blue prints, the shuttle was going to make a fly-by of Earth
on her way to the 'belt at 09:34 next morning. If you could use the term
morning in space. I glanced at my watch, noticed the time of 10:46 p.m.. I
would have to sleep before a shot at Earth, and even then, how was I going to
get down there?

Using the floodlamp, I scanned the entire room. As I was completing the scan, I
noticed three big gray-black spheres lined up against one wall, each about two
metres tall. And something else caught my eye with them; they were opened along
their equatorial lines. Cut in half, so to speak, leaving only a single
straight hinge at one end.

One remarkable thing I noticed about them was the thickness of their skin: I
had estimated about a metrefoot-and-a-half of some grayish-black solid
substance, then about a centimetre of something transparent. I had to find out
what they were.

Ever so slowly, with gestures from my fingers and toes, I pulled my body across
the floor. The centimetres seemed nearly motionless as I passed them on my
twenty-five metre journey. My muscles were aching from continual use of those I
rarely used before this.

It must've been midnight when I finally reached the sphere, completely
exhausted. My muscles would probably be aching for days. Now progress could be
made much more quickly.

I grabbed the floodlamp I had been resting on my back, and aimed it into one of
the spheres, the one I was closest to. It seemed completely empty, and had an
airtight seal. I stretched my hand out, felt the texture of the hull-skin.
Slippery powder. And gray-black. Graphite! The number one material for heat
shielding! This could only mean one thing....

With what little strength remained in me, I crawled into the heavily shelded
sphere. Around the front of the lower rim was not only the normal airtight
plastic-rubber, but what appeared to be small, hypersensitive electrodes,
designed for binary information, not heavy electrical current. I looked through
the inner shell to see where they led. The tiny, micro-thin electrical fibers
led directly to the bottom of the sphere ... and then some.

I noticed a sign laying beside each sphere, "Danger — do not rupture
fibers. Close sphere in case of emergency only. Will open hatch to hull." So
that's what these were; escape pods! My means to Earth! And yet, in this
newly acquired atmosphere of relief, I felt that something was still missing.

Then it dawned on me: Parachutes. None of the spheres had any. How would I make
those last few kilometres without one? Was there any material around to
assemble a makeshift?

I looked on the other side of the sphere and saw with relief six red knap sacks
each labeled "Emergency use only". My mind was going due to lack of sleep. I
had to rest.

When I awoke, it was 9:30. Just four minutes before our closest approach to
Earth. Evidently, the astronauts had expected me to try something, for it was
the secret door to the cabin opening that had waken me. Damn it, if I had known
about that door, I never would've risked my life outside the shuttle!

I had very little time to lose. I reached over the metre-and-a-half rim,
pulling aboard a parachute. At this point, the astronauts began to approach me.
This was it. I reached up to the top hemisphere, and enclosed myself
completely.

The astronauts were, as always, fully in their space suits. However, even a
space suit can't prevent someone from being sucked into the deadly abyss. When
the electrodes made contact, the hull doors rapidly swung open, allowing all
eight psi to be sucked away. Before it diminished, I heard the faint scream of
one of the astronauts trying desperately to keep his grip. I don't know whether
he made it or not.

The great gush of air escaping out the doors was more than enough to break the
inertia on this gigantic sphere, easily snapping off the tiny electrode fibers
that ran from under it to some big binary sensor. My sphere jolted straight
toward Earth out the doors; such a great jolt was it that my body was flung
completely forward. I was knocked unconscious.

I was awakened some five days later by a weak sense of gravity, slowly growing
in intensity. I was being pulled into Earth's gravitational field. However,
after a little while of growing gravitation, it suddenly began to diminish,
as though I were in free fall. A little later, I knew I must've been in
free fall when I felt the sphere begin to heat up.

I was falling through Earth's atmosphere. I must've been going terminal
velocity, as I felt no sense of gravity. Although it was pitch black inside I
knew the graphite shell below me was rapidly boiling away into the atmosphere
from the extreme heat outside the sphere. The lower shell would be gone
shortly.

Well, then, I'd just have to bake this thing on both sides. I braced my body
against the interior, vertically rotated the sphere so that it was upside down.
The sphere kept on rotating. Now it would get evenly baked all over.

During those few seconds of seemingly infinite free fall, my mind was
functioning at many times its normal rate. I thought of my being knocked
unconscious, and suddenly realized that if I hadn't been, the sphere would've
been rendered out of breatheable air inside of two days. The very thing that
most people fear had saved my life.

Within a minute, the graphite shell had boiled away completely. Through the
transparent globe of the interior, I was able to look down and see some three
kilometres between me and the ground. I had to make my jump immediately.

Pulling the parachute over my shoulders, I popped the seal on the sphere, and
let the whole thing swing open as I fell away from it. The rushing air stung
my entire body as I painfully counted three seconds from the time I left the
sphere. I hadn't much altitude left.

I fumbled for the ripcord at my side, pulled it. For a second, I had a deep
fear the parachute failed to function. Then suddenly came the jerking uplift
that accompanies a parachute's unfolding.

I looked down, saw an expanse of about one kilometre of altitude. Just think
what would have happened if I had counted ten like everyone was supposed to!

In about half a minute, I settled lightly onto the ground. I had escaped the
wrath of the shuttle entirely, and was safely back where I had come from
— the fly-by had been near Southern California for some strange reason.

There it was again — the double-sized dull yellow nova of a sun! I
glanced at my watch. Ten thirty! The sun shone at midnight! What was the reason
for this???!?

Then, suddenly — it went out! No warnings, no slow dimming of light, just
"poof!" Needless to say, I was confused. And I was even further confused when I
realized that there was no difference in temperature between the time before
the "sun" went out, and afterward.

Something caught my eye in the night sky where the sun had been. I looked at it
closely, and from the distance it was from me, it appeared to be a small, gold
tinted speck against the glare from the stars and the streetlights. But as it
came closer, I knew that it couldn't have been just a gold speck — my
eyes were focused on too great a distance. Finally, I was certain of what it
was: a golden flying sphere, some five metres in diameter.

So that was the "nova"! I'd just like to know how it did that trick, and
even more importantly, why. From the shape and speed of the thing, I'd guess it
was of alien origin. A flying saucer for a sun.

The thing descended, and came to rest about ten metres from me. I adjusted my
stance, stood poised for attack. A hatch opened on top of it. I was sweating
nervously.

A head popped out of the hatch; a human head! And then another. They
both rose, revealing two men dressed in three-piece black suits, wearing
neckties. One of them reached into his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, showed
me a badge, and announced, "FBI".

"WHAT??!?", I yelled. "Do you know what I've been through because of what you
did?!!?"

"Yes, and we're happy for you. You passed the test!"

"What test?"

"The test of realization and of knowledge. Alex Wei passed it too."

"I still don't have any idea what you're talking about."

At that moment, I heard a loud firing of rocket engines. I looked up to where
the sound originated, saw the space shuttle Columbia II. Alex had seemingly
mastered the controls!

I ran toward the shuttle as quickly as I could manage. The side airlock door
was gaping open, yet showed to light coming through. The shuttle raced closer
and closer, and suddenly, Alex lept from the doorsill.

"Alex!" I shouted, and changed my direction of running to intercept him. I
outstretched my arms, and caught him just before he reached the ground.

I looked up at the doomen shuttle, and the doomed street littered with cars
below it. Suddenly, the engines in its rear boomed and flared up, causing the
shuttle to rise up, and head on a collision course with the ocean. Alex had the
shuttle pre-programmed.

I watched to the west as the shuttle flew low, then dipped out of sight.
"Alex," I began, "You all right?"

"Sure!" he replied. "You were dumb forgetting your space suit!"

I lowered Alex to the ground, turned to the FBI men. "Now then, about this
test? ..."

In the distance I heard the faint splash of the shuttle intercepting the ocean.

"The test," the oldest-looking of the two began, "Was a test of public
awareness. And it is indeed a sad sight to see that only two people of the
entire Los Angeles population passed it.

"The government was just sick of everyone lying around, not paying any
attention to what was going on around them. So, they called in the FBI to rig
up a simple test on the most densely populated area in the U.S.; Los Angeles.
The Air Force had recently uncovered the secret to an anti-grav device (which,
by the way, is still a secret), and along with that had devised a golden sphere
called a photon amplifier, which is what you see before you now.

"While we were flying the 'amp' into place, you may have noticed a dark disc.
That was only the 'amplifier while it was focused on an oblique point in space.
Then, of course, we corrected that, and aimed it directly for the sun (which
the sphere was blocking in a small area), and set it to "2X".

"You may have also noticed some spinning. This was only the required spin on
the anti-grav it keep it functioning."

"Well, Alex," I asked, "How does it feel to have passed the test?"

"Tired. I wanna go to sleep."

The elder of the FBI men sighed. "Don't we all. Say, there's room for four in
the photon amplifier. Why don't we all sleep there for tonight?"

Each of us silently agreed, as we clambered through the hatch atop the golden
ball, and settled into the sphere for a good night's sleep.

We were awaken by Alex just before dawn the next day. Alex claimed he had seen
many sunrises, and there was something too red about this one. "Too red," I
thought. "Probably Ice clouds."

We exited the sphere, each willing to behold a phenomenal view. Alex, to my
left, stared out on the west coastline with an expression of awe on his face.
To my right, the two FBI men, still partly inside the golden ball, beheld the
same awed look, facing the same direction.

Finally, I gaved to the west with everyone else, and saw the grossly oversized
red sun creeping over the horizon.

I misuse the phrase "morning star" here. It's supposed to refer to Venus
(or, if you're lucky, Mercury) when visible in the early morning before the sun
rises. Here, though, it refers to the sun itself.

Confusing a "nova" with a "red giant" is a classic mistake made by all too
many science fiction writers, who should know better. What the sun is going to
expand into at the end of its main sequence lifetime is a red giant; it
will take tens of thousands of years to reach its maximum size, and it will
stay that large for a couple million years. A nova, by contrast, can
only happen in a binary star system with a white
dwarf that's so close to its companion that it sucks material off it and onto
its own surface. Eventually so much material accretes on the surface of the
white dwarf that its outer layer undergoes a burst of nuclear fusion. The same
mass-exchange binary system can "go nova" over and over again every few decades
or centuries. Oh — and don't confuse either a nova or a red giant
for a supernova, which is a different (and much more spectacular) beast
entirely.

When the sun does swell up into a red giant and engulf the Earth,
it's not the gravity that's going to suck it down into its core. In fact, since
a tiny portion of the sun's mass will be farther out than the Earth (in
the outermost layers of its new giant photosphere), its gravitational pull on
the Earth will be slightly weaker. No, what's going to cause the Earth
to spiral into the sun's core is the aerodynamic drag caused by being inside
the solar atmosphere. Since the mass of the sun is going to be spread out over
a volume larger than Earth's orbit, the solar atmosphere will be extremely
tenuous — more rarefied than a laboratory vacuum — but it will
be orders of magnitudes thicker than the solar wind is today.

I wish it were possible for a space shuttle — or even a
space-shuttle-like near-future spacecraft — to make an interplanetary
voyage. But considering our collective reluctance to use anything other than
plain old chemical-combustion rockets for space propulsion, it ain't gonna
happen in my lifetime. If we'd stop being so damned skittish about the
Orion/Longshot
design, we'd be sending probes to other stars right now!

You can't really talk about the temperature of a vacuum. You can only talk
about the temperature of some object in the vacuum. Any point on the
surface of an object in a vacuum that isn't getting hit by sunlight will get
really, really cold. Any point on its surface that is getting hit by
sunlight (or the light of the future sun during its red giant phase) will heat
up until the amount of blackbody radiation it emits matches the amount of
stellar radiation it absorbs.

Unless you're trying to put a satellite in a polar orbit, San Diego is a
monumentally stupid place to launch a spacecraft from. You want to launch in
the same direction the Earth is rotating, to give yourself a nice head start
— but that means launching eastward. If you launch eastward from San
Diego, and a catastrophe happens which destroys your launch vehicle when you're
just a bit downrange, the pieces of your spacecraft will rain down on
land and hit God-knows-what. This is why all Space Shuttle launches were
done from the southernmost tip of Florida; when Challenger blew up a minute
after it left the launch pad, the pieces merely hit the ocean and did no
damage. (Sure, the people on board didn't survive, but at least they didn't
crash onto anyone.)

The distance from Santa Monica to San Diego isn't merely a score of
miles, it's more like a gross of miles.

I'm not sure what I meant by "hole money." Perhaps my piggy bank or savings
account at the time represented a cash stash that I was saving for a rainy day,
by analogy with a hole in the ground where I buried some twenties or
something.

Alex Wei was a classmate of mine at Lincoln Junior High School. He was two
grades behind me, but was nevertheless in the same honors math classes as I
was when I was in 9th grade. I think he might be
this
guy — a university professor of organic chemistry would certainly not
have been beyond his capabilities. He appears here because he appeared in the
dream that inspired this story.

Behold the
Chevy
Nova. There was a rumor that it didn't sell well in Mexico, because "no va"
is Spanish for "it doesn't go" — but rumor has it that rumors are just
rumors.

I'm not entirely sure what kind of IBM microcomputer I was referring to.
This story was written in February 1981, and the IBM PC didn't come out until
August of that year.

Ion engines are a real thing; they've been used on at least two space
probes, Deep Space 1
and Dawn. The
problem is, although they are extremely efficient, they're not at all powerful.
At full throttle, Dawn's three ion engines produced a combined thrust of 90
millinewtons, or about a third of an ounce of force. A solar sail would produce
even less thrust than this, unless it was so huge it outweighed the shuttle it
was attached to.

There would, of course, be no jolt when transitioning from an Earth orbit
to a solar orbit, unless you count the rocket burn to accelerate from Earth
orbital velocity to Earth escape velocity as the jolt.

No mention was made as to how they generated artificial gravity on board
an interplanetary space shuttle. It couldn't have been the anti-grav technology
revealed near the end of the story, because (A) that technology was top secret,
and (B) it required its host craft to be spinning. Perhaps their massive ion
engine put them under a continuous 1g of thrust, whic the crew would
have experienced as "gravity." Hopefully they're careful where they point this
engine, because if you accelerate at 1g in a straight line you'll end up
going 1% of the speed of light in just over three-and-a-half days.

The narrative here implies that this interplanetary space shuttle made a
complete orbit of the sun in a matter of hours. Remember that Mercury, which is
over twice as close to the sun as the Earth is, still takes 88 days to go
around the sun once. A solar orbit of less than a day would only be possible if
your average distance to the sun were under 3 million kilometers. At that
distance, the sun would appear 25 degrees wide, and any space shuttle that
attempted such an orbit would probably melt before it made it around once.

What I referred to as the shuttle's "hull" in this story was supposed to be
the shuttle's cargo bay. You know ... the area enclosed by those two great big
doors, which the real space shuttle always opens in orbit.

"the old technique of complete relaxation before doing a strenuous task"
was one of the many pseudoscientific tricks I'd picked up from my stint at
ISOMATA with Jim the previous summer. In my author's notes for
Messiah to Super-Human, I mentioned that
Jim had convinced me that psychic powers were real and within my grasp. But he
also talked about something one of his martial arts instructors had explained
to him: namely, the average know-nothing plebean person doesn't know the first
thing about moving efficiently. They'll tense muscles on both sides of
the movement they're trying to accomplish, thereby making their own musculature
fight itself. (Try it yourself. Flex your bicep. I'll bet you dollars to
donut-holes that you were actually contracting your bicep and your
tricep at the same time, so that your bicep would have some resistance to work
against. If I grabbed your arm at that moment and tried to pry it open, your
tricep would actually be helping me.) The super-secret technique of
not straining, and only using the muscles that help with a
particular movement, he called "torque." It had as much to do with real torque
as "there was tension in the air" has to do with rubber bands; but he used the
name anyway because it sounded badass or something. Among the tricks of
"torque" were jumping up and touching the ceiling, doing chin-ups without all
that wasteful flailing around, and completely relaxing before performing
an intense action like punching through a wooden board or bending open the
space shuttle's cargo bay doors. (And if you couldn't punch through that board,
it meant you weren't relaxed enough.)

I made the same mistake here that the astronauts did in the movie Space
Cowboys. Remember how in Space Cowboys, Clint Eastwood said that the
reason the satellite's orbit was decaying so rapidly was that it was so heavy?
Well, I made the same mistake here with the trash in the cargo bay. In
freefall, no object has a tendency to go "down". It doesn't matter
whether it's a light little feather or a heavy lump of lead; heavy objects are
no more likely to be found floating than light ones are.

Four times while floating around inside the shuttle's cargo bay, and three
more times thereafter, I used a run-on sentence. They were deliberate attempts
to imitate the writing style of Frank Herbert, who peppered Dune with
such sentences as "He looked up, saw the dark forms of ornithopters hovering
above them."

Although the real space shuttle's cargo bay lacks designated handholds,
it's full of all sorts of places an astronaut can grab on to, as shown in
this picture.

Details of this story's "space shuttle"'s orbital trajectories are woefully
lacking here, but the few details I can pick out after all these decades
don't appear to add up. The spacecraft's closest approach to Earth somehow
allowed an "escape pod," ejected solely by differential air pressure, to
put itself on a trajectory that intersected the Earth's atmosphere at a safe
re-entry angle ... after drifting for 5 days. Wow. It's almost as though the
author was a 15-year-old who had never taken a course in orbital mechanics, or
something.

A spacecraft re-entering Earth's atmosphere is going considerably
faster than terminal velocity. That's why it heats up — it's
aerobraking, usually with a deceleration of several g (which the crew on
board most emphatically do feel). Even if it were falling at
terminal velocity, an occupant would still feel 1g of gravity, as it
wouldn't be accelerating.

As you can probably guess from the last paragraph, I liked to read Arthur
C. Clarke short stories. They always had a twist ending in the last
sentence.